Social Media Marketing

The use of social media websites and social networks to market a company’s products and services. Social media marketing provides companies with a way to reach new customers and engage with existing customers (Investopedia, 2017).

The current most popular social media sites are:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Snapchat

YouTube

Reddit

What does a good social media audit do for you?

• It serves as the ultimate health check for your social initiatives
• It’s the single best point to start developing or improving your social media strategy as a whole and for each network
• It unveils important trends and KPIs to add to your weekly or monthly reporting
• It enables you to see your brand from the perspective of your customers
• It builds awareness internally and brings the whole team up to speed regarding results, goals, and vision

Full Article Available at: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/8-tips-conducting-effective-social-media-audit

The 5W’s Model

One way of looking at how to audit social media is by looking at the Quesenberry (2015) model. This is a sophisticated model looking at a variety of factors affecting social media. This model can also be applied to all social media channels and not one exclusively. Using the “5 W’s” (Who, What, When, Where, Why) as the framework, makes it easy to apply your social media too and gives a wide picture into consumer thought. Also, the model helps digest what your competitors are doing in terms of social media strategy and allowing you to compare the differences.

Conducting a social media audit following this template helps compel companies to figure out each channel’s purpose and key performance indicators. For example, “why does the organisation have a Pinterest page and how is success being measured?” Simply because the competitor has a page is not a sound strategic reason (Quesenberry, 2016). This work was published in the book ‘Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution’ by Keith A. Quesenberry.

This overall, will allow companies to get an in-depth view of where they are going wrong with their social media marketing and see where their competitors are getting it right. Which means they can utilise their social media marketing more effectively.

Link to Full Article: https://hbr.org/2015/11/conducting-a-social-media-audit

Tips for a Social Media Marketing Audit

The helpful tips highlighted in this article are:

• Determine who on the staff should be involved.
• Take an inventory of all social media accounts.
• Review each channel’s profile, “about us,” bios and visuals.
• Examine community growth.
• Review elements of each community like demographics, engagement and interests.
• Evaluate social media posting activity.
• Review competitors’ efforts and overall business objectives.
• Perform an audit regularly, a minimum of twice a year.

These can be helpful to any gaming industry company, as they can create a checklist of which they can monitor social media progress. These tips are also handy as they can be done by anyone as they do not require specialist knowledge and doesn’t require any major monetary investment.

View full article here: https://www.wideawakenv.com/dr-tips-for-social-media-marketing-audit

A Quick and Easy 15 Minute Social Media Audit

Lee (2016) mentions that identifying the goals you want to achieve is important when doing a social media audit. This is important as a ‘plan of action’ for your audit and lays a pathway for future growth of your social media marketing. For example, this could be increased social engagement, which can be measured through sites such as Google Analytic or your ‘@’ twitter mentions. It should be a personal goal and tailored to your company. Another example could be follower growth, which can be easily tracked by writing down the percentage growth gained after each day.

Also, viewing and locating your competitor’s profiles is a crucial factor according to Lee. After selecting 8 similar companies to your brand, you can regularly check these to help improve your brand’s social media. Tracking branding; popularity; frequency; engagement and type of posts is key. You can make a new spreadsheet to track this or add to your existing audit spreadsheet. These will build a profile and the trends will show areas that you should improve on.

Finally, follow up on your goals and metrics to see how you’ve grown. Using sites such as Google Analytics to track the number of consumers that have visited your social media sites. Also, is there any correlation to how often you post and how your audience grows? This can be a key factor. Furthermore, engagement… dig into how many conversations you have on a weekly basis. Engagement can include direct contact, retweets, likes, +1s, and reshares.

Full Article: https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-audit

Conclusion

In an ever expanding internet reliable age in technology, social media is growing more important to businesses by the day. Which why it is so crucial to utilise this asset to make sure it is as effective as it possibly can be. The tools included in the post can dramatically help boost any gaming companies social media status and should help them to gain more reach. If they manage to make their social media marketing as effective as it can using these tools, hopefully sales of their products should rise with this.

Refences:

Harvard Business Review. (2017). Conducting a Social Media Audit. [online] Available at: https://hbr.org/2015/11/conducting-a-social-media-audit [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].

Lee, K. (2017). The 15-Minute Social Media Audit Everyone Can Do. [online] Social. Available at: https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-audit [Accessed 28 Nov. 2017].

Radcliffe, B. (2017). Social Media Marketing (SMM). [online] Investopedia. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-media-marketing-smm.asp [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Opitz, L. and Opitz, L. (2017). 8 Tips for Conducting an Effective Social Media Audit. [online] Social Media Today. Available at: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/8-tips-conducting-effective-social-media-audit [Accessed 28 Nov. 2017].

Wideawakenv.com. (2017). Tips for an Effective Social Media Audit. [online] Available at: https://www.wideawakenv.com/dr-tips-for-social-media-marketing-audit [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].

Quesenberry, K. (2016). Social media strategy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.